My husband’s sister is getting married this Friday in Portand, Oregon so we made our first family trip to the United States. I have been worrying about flying with him here practically since he was born (worrying is such a productive state, don’t you think?!) and crunch time came round all too soon for me.

As there are no direct flights from London to Portland here is what our journey involved:

All in all, a 22 1/2 hour trip. I was practically hyperventilating at the thought of it. As I have mentioned previously Munchkin is not the most placid of children, in that he likes to be active ALL. The. Time. How on earth would we cope with him on a journey of this scale?

I shouldn’t have bother worrying. He was good a gold the entire time. He slept in my arms for about an hour of the 1st flight and we managed to keep him entertained for the rest. He charmed most of the plane including a really grumpy old man, played lots of games, looked out the window, cuddled and generally, had a good time.

He went with his dad through imigration at Houston on his US passport and waited for me while my non-US queue took forever. Cue mad dash run to get our next flight. So much for leaving lots of time between flights.

We then got on the next flight, put him in his car seat and he slept the entire 4 hours. It was great as it meant Jer and I were finally handsfree to read and have a bit of a nap ourselves.

The lovely rental guy in Portland saw how much baby stuff we had and upgraded us for free to a much bigger car (Dollar, I salute you!) and we headed off to Jer’s sister’s house. Except that when we followed the printed out map and directions from the internet we ended up way on the wrong side of town. After calling her, we realised that the directions had picked up SW instead of SE as the name of her street and had to navigate our way by guesswork to her house (Google maps, for once I do NOT salute you).

Once we got to Cody’s house it was nearly 10pm which was the equivilent of 6am the next day for us. This is getting near Munchkin’s wake up time for the day so I was zero confident he would sleep. However, mum and dad were fairly exhausted so after letting him play with his new toys, the dog and the cat we put him to bed in his travel cot.

Miracle of miracles, he slept through from midnight to 7.30am the next morning (and so did we!). We have switched him straight over to normal US time for everything and he is totally fine. So much for my other worry which was jetlag. I am more jetlagged than he is!

He is coping so well with different environments, people he has only really seen on webcam and the whole timezone change.

I am so relieved and even more importantly, so proud of my world traveller baby!